Hopefully this default behavior will change, but for now users will have to stumble upon the appropriate setting in order to set up new drives. Yes, it is somewhat confusing that partitions exist alongside each other on the same physical disks, but hiding physical devices entirely does not make life easier, and users confused by such things probably won’t ever open Disk Utility in the first place. In the case of an unformatted drive, this “simplicity” is infuriating.
Unfortunately I didnt have the time to investigate why this happen and how to fix it. I wasnt able to do this to the second partition and had errors. Now you should be able to right click on the first SSD partition and click Erase.
This whole mess is a great example of Apple trying to make something “easier” in a way that backfires and makes things harder. Go into your Mac OS partition and open Disk Utility. Connect the drive, select it in Disk Utility, and click the Erase button in the toolbar. (Though some companies sell Mac-formatted drives, and charge extra for the feature.) Formatting a drive in Disk Utility is easy, though Disk Utility uses a different term: Erase.
From now on it will show up in Disk Utility and Finder alike. Most pre-formatted drives are set up for Windows PCs. Name your drive, select a filesystem, then click “Erase.” Just like that, you’ve formatted your drive. There it is! Select the drive, then click the “Erase” button to format it. So where’s the fix? In the menu bar-click View > Show All Devices.Ĭlick this and you’ll see all inserted devices, regardless of whether they are formatted or not. That’s not very ideal in this circumstance, especially since the popup about the unformatted drive is what brought us here in the first place. This means any empty drive-any drive without formatted partitions, that is-won’t show up at all. This is because Disk Utilitiy’s default is to only show formatted volumes. This isn’t exactly the kind of clear, user-friendly language you’d expect from Apple, is it? And it gets weirder: if you click “Initialize”, Disk Utility opens-which makes sense-but as of this writing does not show drives without partitions by default. Insert such a disk and you’ll see an error message: “The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer.” There are three options: “Eject,” “Ignore,” and “Initialize.” You might think this means it can’t be used to create partitions on new disks, which is frustrating, but you can solve this problem with one click. Now a new Partition will appear, and you can change the size according to what you need. You should see two options: First Aid or Partition.
If you really want to see everything that macOS hides from you, launch Terminal & type diskutil list - you'll see 'real' disks & volumes, & also synthesised ones which are virtual but necessary for the smooth operation of the system.įor example - /dev/disk0 (internal, physical):Ģ: Apple_APFS Container disk1 1000.0 GB disk0s2Ġ: APFS Container Scheme - +1000.0 GB disk1ġ: APFS Volume Macintosh HD 585.5 GB disk1s1ĭespite all this, all you will see in Disk Utility is either just Macintosh HD, or your drive's physical name with & Macintosh HD inside that.The macOS Disk Utility, by default, will not show you an empty, unformatted drive. In Disk Utility, select your Mac’s internal drive (or an internal SSD). After your SDD drive is plugged in you’ll need to use Disk Utility to format it Mac OS Extended (Journaled): 4. If you don't need or want to see any of this 'under the hood' detail, you can set Disk Utility to only show Volumes, not all devices.Ĭmd ⌘ 1 or View Menu > Show Only Volumes will do this for you. Plug the SSD into the enclosure, and then into the Mac, and it should appear on the desktop as an ‘Untitled’ drive. This will entail actually making 4 partitions, 3 of which will be nominally hidden from you.
If you format your main internal disk from Recovery, Disk Utility will actually set the drive up ready to accept a new macOS.